


pinhole theory

by paracyane



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga), Devilman Crybaby - Fandom
Genre: (kind of), 25 Lives, Canon Universe, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 10:11:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13456062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paracyane/pseuds/paracyane
Summary: Love, to Akira, must smell like rain.





	pinhole theory

**Author's Note:**

> no one stopped me from watching devilman crybaby so here we are

01.

For years, Ryou watches Akira allow his heart to be broken by the things Ryou tries to protect him from. The very things Akira tries to protect from Ryou. There’s something about this that feels fundamentally wrong, like he is missing a part of himself. Like he is missing something that he cannot remember.

Ryou thinks that this is the first time.

It must be, because Akira looks at him the same way he searches around in the dark like he believes there is something out there waiting to attack. He looks at his foster sister like she is the most beautiful, amazing person he has ever seen, and she is frustratingly the reason Akira leaves him in the end.

Of course it is Satan who finishes the job, and of course it is Ryou, watching the angels descending upon the ruined planet, clutching Akira to his chest the same particular way Akira had held the one he loved.

 

02.

They spend their lives together, then separately, then together again, before the next renewal occurs and Satan re-makes his challenge.

Ryou spends his days without Akira waiting for the day to see him again, for the moment in which the fire he has lit behind him catches up and consumes the very space in which he and Akira coexist, their ashes blowing away crassly as if the Earth with its soil and roots and rock itself is tired of being the acting battleground of their failures.

Again. Satan falls again from the cursed heavens, and all that is waiting for him is another Akira; another Akira for his demise.

 

03.

“You’ll be with me forever, right?” Akira asks, anxious and scared, one night when they get lost in the woods long after sundown. Above the canopy, the moons scatter messily as far as either of them can see.

Ryou sticks his hand in his pocket to make sure he hasn’t lost his box cutter. Akira is clinging so desperately to Ryou’s other arm, and the tree they have taken shelter under shakes its branches with the wind as if it knows there are two unwelcome visitors making themselves at home.

“Of course,” he says, feeling around blindly until he finds Akira’s hand and interlaces their fingers. “We’ll always be together.”

 

04.

Only a truly remarkable human being could succeed in driving a fallen angel to madness. Ryou has only a few moments of silence to contemplate this revelation before the cold beings descend, bringing the destruction that is rivaled only by his own actions. The deluge overwhelms what little is left of the rock that makes up the core of the planet. Lava falls torrential around him, and yet none of it burns when coming in contact with his skin.

God never takes long to remake the planet they have both laid a claim to. It is not enough time for his tears to dry on Akira’s body.

Nothing ever is.

 

05.

The sun is setting, and Akira’s skin is bathed red. But that could also be the blood, which doesn’t belong to him but Satan instead.

Ryou thinks that this has never happened before.

They’re in the middle of a field that is more rock than grass now, and there isn’t a single cloud for Ryou to look at.

Akira, sufficiently horrified at himself, is holding Ryou like he has held him a thousand, million times before with the same touch that never hurt, and something flickers in the back of Ryou’s head like a broken switch.

He thinks that perhaps he has been waiting a long time, to die by Akira’s hand.

 

06.

In a universe where Akira is not condemned to die the moment he meets Asuka Ryou, their first kiss would mark the first chapter of their story together instead of the afterword, and Akira’s last memory of Ryou would be of the relish of life and not the hatred of death.

In this universe, Asuka Ryou does not trigger the downfall Fudou Akira, but saves him instead. Saves him from the rest of the world in addition to his own goodness, the goodness that threatened to consume him alive and hang from the highest tower wall on the eastern continent.

In this universe, Asuka Ryou carries his darkness to the edge of civilization and slices it out of his body. He travels the distance he once covered trying to kill the boy he loves and comes home to him instead. There is a light in the hall, the immovable light that guides him when God comes for him once again, striking down all that he once held, and will hold again most dear.

 

07.

When Satan reawakens, it is with a human experience that encumbers the decisions they make. The league of demons follow his every order, but their unwillingness is palpable, as is Ryou’s weakness.

Ironically, it had been Satan who learned of love before Asuka Ryou.

 

08.

But it is Asuka Ryou who falls the way he does, and it is Satan who falls irrevocably.

 

09.

Akira is delighted by snow the way humans are entranced with the simple ways of nature, innocent and awed. Pure in a way that Ryou will never understand but has learned to acknowledge. Akira insists they climb up the hills near the lighthouse and Ryou follows him all the way up, half a step behind when he falls, tumbling along the frozen ground until he hits a rock.

“Ryou-chan!” Akira screams, and Ryou opens his eyes to see stars. He blinks away the phosphenes just for the dizziness to rush to his head.

Akira sinks to his knees in front of Ryou, crying and cradling Ryou’s head, tightening his grip until it is impossible for Ryou to breathe.

“I want to cry for you,” Akira says to him, with a shaky voice and dry eyes, at the very same spot some years later.

Looking down, Satan smiles, and does not love him any less.

 

10.

The end of the twenty year apocalypse is the beginning of the new world, a world where Satan is alive as Asuka Ryou and loves a boy who he repeatedly dooms with the two hands God has given him.

This time, Akira loves him back, and this time, Ryou dooms him not by creating a Devilman, but by allowing the absence of one.

 

11.

“We’ll always be together,” Ryou says to Akira, and always, he keeps his promise.

 

12.

Death comes by the fistfuls, and Ryou merely watches from the sidelines, the steel of forbidden machinery weighing down the inside of his coat. It isn’t difficult to find Akira again after years of estrangement, and even less difficult to become reacquainted. To gain his trust again, although Ryou is sure he hadn’t lost it in the first place.

As per usual, Akira shrinks up to half his size to avoid being noticed, leaving Ryou to bridge the gap. Akira is scared, always scared, but Ryou already knows that he himself is more scared. Already knows that he has always needed Akira more than Akira has ever needed him.

 

13.

Ryou turns Akira to prove a hypothesis, but Satan turns Akira because they have fallen in love.

 

14.

Akira knows he is always welcome at wherever Ryou happens to be, but he doesn’t start taking advantage of the knowledge until after Ryou takes the ultimate advantage of Akira’s trust in him.

And not even his laughter can chase away the ghosts that haunt Ryou in the daylight, the ghosts that follow him into his body and desecrates the soul he houses.

 

15.

Ryou doesn’t know how long they have been flying when he lands on the ground where there once was a house. Or perhaps a school or a church or Akira’s old home. The fire extends far beyond where Ryou can see, but the stretch of night covering the sky engulfs them.

“Kill me,” Satan commands, and Akira snarls, his skin burning away as he obliges, snatching Ryou’s still-beating heart and placing it over the left side of his own chest as if it had been his to take all along.

 

16.

Love, to Akira, must smell like rain.

Ryou thinks this because of how the rain sounds when it hits the roof of wherever he has taken shelter. Because of how the rain makes him think of Akira, loving a thing that had no chance at life. Of Akira, loving a thing that did not deserve him in the slightest. Akira, the one Ryou deserves.

The one he deserves because he is foolish, and because he is the one who is not worthy of being deserved by Akira.

 

17.

The body of water that Ryou floats through is largest thing created by God on this planet. Ryou floats endlessly for days and weeks and months before he washes up onshore because he is something abandoned and unwanted.

It is the largest thing Ryou has ever conquered alone. And nobody, not even God, will ever understand.

 

18.

When he flits back into consciousness, he is in Akira’s arms and covered in blood.

It must be demon blood. Akira’s breathing is labored and his heart is beating impossibly fast. The way Akira is holding him, Ryou can feel every time it thumps behind his ribs. He opens his mouth to say something, but the world is spinning, and Ryou briefly wonders if it had been wise to risk Akira’s life the way he did.

What would he be without Fudou Akira? Where would he be homesick for if there was no one he missed? Would he still be Asuka Ryou if there was no Fudou Akira?

The answer does not come to him, and Ryou, despite everything, is not sure he ever wants to find out.

 

19.

“We’ll always be together,” Ryou says to Akira, and overhead the stars begin to rearrange themselves like they are moved by Satan’s will alone, shining down mercilessly on the humbled angel and his beloved devilman.

 

20.

Akira has a habit of collecting animals that cannot be tamed; the birds with bent wings, rodents with missing limbs, kittens with broken teeth. He takes them in and gives them a place to sleep, food to eat, love to heal.

Most of them die in his care, but some survive, and it is these some that run away from Akira as soon as they can manage it. Akira is left to cry over what is left behind, with only the marks in his flesh serving as proof that it had happened at all.

Ryou is only one of these charity cases, but he is also the only one who comes back to Akira at the end.

 

21.

Satan knows, far before Ryou does, how to save Akira. So consequently, Ryou thinks he knows too, and it is a subconscious decision that he makes to reach out for Akira’s hand again.

There isn’t anything Ryou wants from the wretched world more than Akira, and God grants him his one selfish wish long past the due date. Ryou waits with time cupped in his hands and spends the collective hours wondering how much he could give to Akira before he deemed it as excessive. Wondering if eternity itself was long enough for him to learn and re-learn the way Akira wants to be loved.

In this universe where they are yet again doomed, Ryou speeds along the highway with Akira in the passenger seat, wondering how fast he would have to drive to keep themselves safe from the greater beings.

 

22.

“You robbed me of the most important thing,” Akira yells, and Satan does not understand, will never understand, why Ryou himself was not the most and only important thing.

 

23.

On the cliff where they had once gazed at the stars together, Fudou Akira approaches, the Akira that Ryou had tried to protect by making his body that of a demon, the Akira that found Ryou when he was lost and astray on this very cliff, the Akira that Ryou had sworn to safeguard from all things.

At the end of all things, Fudou Akira approaches, and he holds the one he had loved, still loves, and renounces Ryou like he is renouncing demons. Like he is renouncing Satan.

 

24.

Satan has never felt remorse before, but Asuka Ryou has, and it is Asuka Ryou who looks upon Akira’s perfectly rigid, deathly parted half-corpse.

It is Asuka Ryou who kills the boy he loves. It is Asuka Ryou who cries for the boy he loves.

 

25.

And it is Satan.


End file.
